Michigan Met Connecticut In The Muck And Won

Monday's NCAA Championship Game delivered a huge victory for the University of Connecticut, in that Dan Hurley did not bring himself, his team, the university or the coaching profession into three days of disrepute, nor did Dawn Staley repeatedly offer to kick his ass. Hey, sometimes the championship you're playing for isn't necessarily the same one everyone else recognizes. It will be a lot of text to fit onto a banner, but it's something—five wins packaged neatly into one loss. Not that Ol' Bug Eyes himself didn't want to win the national championship of men's college basketball. It's just that his charges chose a bad night to get into early foul trouble and subsequently watch Michigan make 25 free throws, and a worse one on which to miss 11 consecutive threes while trying to dig out of a double-digit deficit. They definitely chose a bad time to be scheduled to play in a gigantic football stadium that made shooting from distance a festival of long rebounds for both teams. They could not have picked a more dreadful night to challenge a bigger stronger team at the rim. All that suggests that Michigan's 69-63 victory in Lucas Oil Stadium last night was a fait accompli for the Wolverines. It wasn't, and not just because Michigan hadn't won one in 37 years and represents an elephantine conference that hadn't won a title in the last 26. This would be statistically accurate, but only that. The game was in many ways a grisly slog, not the least of which was the fact that Michigan's shooting numbers were only barely better than UConn's—13 misses in 15 attempts from three, and just 21-for-55 from the floor overall for the night. The difference was that, after having fallen behind early, the Huskies needed to take 33 treys in an unforgiving airport hangar with roughly the same shooting background that the Artemis astronauts see out their window, against a team whose defense wasn't offering any agreeable alternatives inside 12 feet. Connecticut acquitted themselves well enough for being the less accomplished team at the rim, but in the end that only gets you a half-hour of lead time in the transfer portal.